USAID’s Cuba Folly (II)

The Obama administration defended its creation of a Twitter-like Cuban communications network to undermine the communist government, declaring the secret program was “invested and debated” by Congress and wasn’t a covert operation that required White House approval.

But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said Thursday they had known nothing about the effort, which one of them described as “dumb, dumb, dumb.” [bold mine-DL]

It strains credulity to say that the program was “discreet” rather than covert in nature. The agency reportedly went to great lengths to make it extremely difficult to track the funding for the operation back to the U.S. government, and it did this deliberately because it understood that association with the U.S. would interfere with the goal of stirring up unrest. A covert operation is one that “is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor,” which is a reasonably good description of what USAID did. So it’s possible that in addition to being potentially harmful to the agency’s other work, the “Cuban Twitter” scheme was also illegal. Illegal or not, it was certainly very dumb.

“The very idea of fomenting revolution”, whether or not we have “influence over the process or the consequences – seems terribly irresponsible”. You’d have thought that by now in our nation’s history, we would have learned that we very rarely have long-term influence over the process or consequences. So we should stop trying to foment revolution anywhere in the world. Period.

I’d agree that it must have been covert, not “discreet,” except for the amazing fact that the program came to light via a journalist’s Freedom of Information act request. If it was covert, wouldn’t the key information have been redacted or not released in the first place?

But that a program like this was done without reasonable efforts to preserve secrecy is even more astounding (not in a good way) than that it was undertaken at all (and that’s saying something).